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More efforts needed to protect religious minorities: HRW
Human Rights Watch (HRW) deputy Asia director Phelim Kine has said Indonesiaâs religious minorities will continue to live in fear unless President Joko âJokowiâ Widodoâs administration prioritizes their protection and implements a zero-tolerance policy toward abuses by Islamic militants
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H
uman Rights Watch (HRW) deputy Asia director Phelim Kine has said Indonesia's religious minorities will continue to live in fear unless President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo's administration prioritizes their protection and implements a zero-tolerance policy toward abuses by Islamic militants.
Kine praised President Jokowi's measures on Sunday, during which he publicly recognized that Indonesia had a problem of rising religious intolerance and called on Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest Muslim organization, to promote 'moderate Islamic values' as a means to counter often-violent militant Islamists.
He said President Jokowi's recognition of Indonesia's rising religious intolerance was a contrast to that of his predecessor, former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whom he said had turned a blind eye to religious intolerance problems during the decade of his presidency.
Kine said President Jokowi's call for NU's greater involvement in addressing religious intolerance was recognition that both NU and Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second-largest Muslim organization, were passively complicit in the problem of worsening religious intolerance.
He said neither organization had publicly opposed a 2005 edict issued by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) that ruled that the Ahmadiyah community was deviating from true Islamic teachings.
The deputy director further explained that in January 2014, NU's general secretary H. Marsudi 'soft-pedalled' the danger of religious intolerance and related violence by denying that such incidents were religion related. Marsudi, he said, had described them instead as the result of 'other factors' such as romantic entanglements and traffic congestion.
'President Jokowi is fooling himself if he thinks that he can outsource the solving of Indonesia's religious intolerance problem to NU and Muhammadiyah. His first order of business should be putting an end to the Indonesian government's well-documented role in victimizing religious minorities,' said Kine.
He further said the President could start this by pursuing the swift punishment of police and government officials who were too often passively or actively complicit in incidents of harassment, intimidation or violence against religious minorities.
'He should also order a review of existing laws, regulations and decrees on religion to identify provisions at odds with freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, and create a timetable for revising or repealing the offending provisions,' said Kine. (ebf)(+++)
